06.26.188:15 am

Tweaking the Twig Tweak Module: A Simple Drupal Site Recipe

front page twig template

Many years ago I worked for a printing company. While I was there, we implemented a workflow that allowed us to produce business cards within 15 minutes of the client submitting their request. Through that experience I learned the competitive advantage of providing a simple service in a short timeframe.

At Speed & Function, we typically work on complex projects where completing the design, development, and QA phases can take months. However, a little known fact is that we can also tackle quick and simple tasks.

There is a common assumption that Drupal is only for large multi-user projects with complex business logic and high page counts. It is also believed that Drupal has significant restrictions on the design and templates that can be used within Drupal’s themes. Both of these assumptions are false.

In this post, I’ll demonstrate a quick and easy way to launch a simple, custom designed site on Drupal 8. Read More

06.18.181:47 pm

Performance and Scalability — A Primer

By: Ruslan

Performance is how fast your application runs and it’s directly tied to scalability – the amount of users it can handle. The less resources your application uses, the higher number of users it can handle without additional investments (getting additional server, database, etc.).

The most common performance problem of web applications is the web page loading speed. Time is a hot commodity for web users and if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, they tend to skip it or are less likely to come back.

The performance issue that affects many successful startups is the application downtime and data loses. Usually, startups don’t invest in performance upfront, so as their users base grows, their application doesn’t have enough capacity, resulting in crashes and downtime. Even worse — all the data sent to the server during the downtime is usually lost. This leads to a decline in reputation among users, which is one of the reasons a startup can fail fail after a successful launch.

The good news is that a solutions exists. If you’ve already launched your product and are watching the number of users grow each day, now is the right time to think about performance and scalability.

Examples of regular performance issues:
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